SlideScreen Adds Useful Data to Your Android Phone

SlideScreen is an Android app that brings your mail, social feeds, weather, battery status, and other important information right to the home screen of your Android phone.

If you're one of the many new Android users after the holiday season's spate of Android-based mobile phone releases on just about every major carrier, then you're probably just starting to get used to the way Android looks and feels. And you're probably wondering which apps can make it even more useful. For example, depending on the phone you have, the home screen is either a wealth of commonly used applications and widgets or a barren list of apps that you can launch.

Enter SlideScreen, an Android app that brings your mail, social feeds, weather, battery status, and other important information right to the home screen of your Android phone. Best of all, if you don't mind an ad at the bottom of the screen, it's completely free.

SlideScreen completely reorganizes your phone's home screen. That's the beauty of Android phones: You can download apps that totally redefine the user experience and change the look and feel of the device to match your needs. Once you have the app installed, it replaces your home screen and allows you to see at a single glance new messages in your inbox, new voice messages, new SMS messages, the weather, battery status, and updates from Twitter, Facebook, or any other RSS feed.

Once SlideScreen is installed and configured to determine your location, (to get weather forecasts), you have the option of replacing your home screen with it or leaving it as an app that you can launch at any time for quick access to your favorite feeds and streams. If you use the app to replace your home screen, you can bring up your applications by touching your menu or home button.

Tap any item on your home screen, and SlideScreen will take you directly to the app for that item. For example, if you touch a new tweet from one of your friends, the app will open Twitter and show it to you. If you touch an article from one of your favorite blogs, you'll be handed off to the browser as it loads the article you touched. You can even configure SlideScreen to keep track of your stock portfolio, giving you updates on your stocks' performance through the day.

SlideScreen runs on any Android phone. In addition to the ad-supported free version is a pro version that gets rid of the ad for $7, which isn't a lot to spend when you consider how helpful the app can be--especially on phones where there is no custom home screen app.